In the years following the 2008/09 financial crisis, Dan Langlois realized the allocation strategy for the Calgary Foundation’s endowment portfolio needed a significant adjustment if it planned to meet its annual funding goals. “I knew we needed to do something in terms of increasing the return in the portfolio to preserve the corpus or the […]
Institutional investors face several challenges in proving the value of sustainable investments, said Arijit Banik, treasurer at York University, during a session at the Canadian Investment Review’s 2024 Endowment & Foundation Investment Forum in June. It’s difficult to measure the impact of an investment, even the cleanest ones, with the current measurement framework available to […]
The goals of impact investing can be more easily achieved through private assets, said Martin Bélanger, director of investments at Western University, during a fireside chat at the Canadian Investment Review’s 2024 Endowment & Foundation Investment Forum in June. “We’ve transitioned our private equity portfolio from a fund-to-fund approach to making direct investment in primary […]
The Canadian pension assets under management of the country’s top 40 investment managers increased by 7.7 percentage points over the previous year, from nearly $989 million at June 30, 2022 to more than $1 billion at June 30, 2023, according to the latest report by the Canadian Institutional Investment Network. The CIIN, which is a […]
According to York University’s Arijit Banik, there’s only one way forward for environmental, social and governance standards: it’s time for an evolution. The treasurer responsible for overseeing the university’s endowment fund wants to go beyond simply investing in wind and solar energies to tick a box. Instead, his investment team has pushed towards sustainable infrastructure […]
Jacky Shen suspects he was the oldest intern Simon Fraser University’s treasury department ever had. It was 2007, he was in his early 40s, had just arrived in Canada with his family and was studying for a master’s degree in the university’s wealth management program. As an intern, Shen — now the university’s treasurer and […]
In the vast majority of Canadian medical malpractice lawsuits, doctors’ legal defences and patients’ settlements are paid by the Canadian Medical Protective Association, an organization representing more than 105,000 physicians. “It’s a non-profit mutual defence organization, not an insurer. From an investment perspective, this allows more flexibility as the asset mix is not determined by […]
In 2016, the Calgary Foundation launched an impact investment program — one that required as much creativity as financial acumen to design. Perhaps that’s why the job fell to Lauren Frosst, director of investments at the endowment fund, which provided $66.9 million in funding to 1,100 charitable organizations last year. Beyond her experience designing a […]
The pension plan for the faculty and staff of the University of Toronto grew from $6.3 billion to $6.6 billion in the first six months of 2021. For the second half of the year, the assets were officially in the custody of the University Pension Plan, though the day-to-day management of portfolios remained UTAM’s responsibility well into […]
Mission hedging argues foundations and endowments can do more good by loading up on profitable companies they oppose.